It's refreshing to hear a comment along these lines from an engineer at one of our competitors. Recently it's felt like every week or so there's another vendor sponsored or even vendor written "technical document" comparing Solaris 10 to an offering from one our competitors. Usually they go to great lengths to confuse the reader and explain how their product will have better functionality in a "future release".

The best ones are those that are marked for "internal use only", these wonders of misinformation most often get "left behind" at customer sites. This particular type of document seems to be based on the belief that customers don't actually do any fact checking and generally believe most of what they read. They make for very interesting reading, the attacks on DTrace and Containers always providing some outstanding misdirection, stretching of the truth and basic misleading information.

If you're wondering how we get them (they do say "for internal use only" after all), we sometimes use google, you can occasionally find them with a well refined search, or more frequently, customers just give them to us. This usually happens in conjunction with either a request for a response or a comment to the effect that they don't like being treated like idiots.

Personally, I can quite enjoy a bit of namecalling etc but when it comes to the technical papers, marketing people should be helping their engineering counterparts to focus on improving their products, not writing rubbish that most customers will either ignore or see through.

Chris's Disclaimer Any bad behaviour on my part either in the past or the future cannot be used as evidence against my stance in this blog entry. I'm allowed to take the high ground as our product is better than everyone elses, I know, I have the documents to prove it and I'd share them but they're marked "internal use only" I'm afraid.

*91* of the *Fortune 100* can't be wrong (they're all using Solaris 10). Technorati Tags Solaris Solaris Containers Zones Xen Virtualization Google